COCIE's competitive edge

How is the economy affecting the commercial real estate market right now? Angie and I meet with many different agents every month -- attending many broker meetings, in our classes, and during office visits. Honestly, the answers to that question are as varied as the agents we're talking to. Several COCIE members are expecting record years. Others report that they're doing as well as ever -- but working three times harder to do it.

However the economy impacts your business, the tools provided by your COCIE membership give you a competitive edge in terms of marketing strength, market intelligence and valuable time saved for other pursuits.

Is marketing important to you? CDXMail Plus is a powerful tool for communicating with up to 1,600 agents in the Columbus market all at one time. This e-mail blast program allows you to broadcast your listings, uncover pocket listings and shadow space, advertise your broker open houses, make broker announcements -- all with just a few mouse clicks. Only COCIE members can send CDXMails -- but non members who want to receive them may contact us to be added to the list.

If exposure is important to your property owners, you should let them know that COCIE member listings are pushed to many local Web pages. In addition to COCIE.org, we currently feed member listings to the Columbus Chamber of Commerce GIS, The Downtown Development Resource Center and, where applicable: to The City of Dublin Web page, the City of Gahanna Web page, the City of Grove City, the City of Lancaster, the City of Upper Arlington, Licking County, Fairfield County and the list is growing.

This is all accomplished with no effort on your part -- once you input your listing in the CDX, it will automatically appear on the correct sites. While we gather non-member listing data as a service to our members, non-member listings are not fed to external Web sites.

If knowledge is power, COCIE is your key to powerful sales. We provide you with the most current and complete commercial property data set in the Columbus marketplace -- at very competitive rates. Using our property-centric database, you can accurately analyze any property set in any way you choose. The hardest part is selecting the properties you want to analyze!
Your options run the gamut from our tracked set properties to cities or submarkets -- or even a custom mapped trade area. Once you have selected your property set, it's easy to run vacancy and absorption reports, gross leasing activity reports, tenant analysis and more. You can use the data to compare and contrast submarkets, cities, counties -- or custom trade areas.

Finally, if you're fishing for listing opportunities, it's easy to search off market and expired listings, as well as For Sale by Owner properties currently listed in COCIE. This material is covered in the Advanced (COCIE II) class offered monthly at the CBR.

Are you looking for a targeted mailing list? COCIE has several tools you can use. Tenant ProspeX is a database of 81,636 companies in central Ohio. Based on Dunn & Bradstreet data and enhanced by its link to our property centric database, this service can be used in many ways. You can search the database by company name, location, business type, number of employees, estimated number of square feet occupied, gross annual sales, move-in date and any potential combination of those criteria.

For example, you can pull all office tenants in any area occupying Class C space that lease their office and have been in place longer than 36 months. Think they might be ripe for an upgrade? Once you have cherry picked the list, it's easy to print mailing labels and call sheets. You can even export the data to Excel for use in your own contact program or to create mail merge documents.

If you have property for sale, it's possible to create a targeted mailing list of building owners from the Verified Sales Comparables database, with a little reverse engineering. First, set up your search as if you were looking for properties just like yours that have recently sold. Then, export the resulting list to Excel. You'll see owner contact information in columns AH through AN in the resulting spread sheet. Since this owner data is taken from the deed, rather than the County Auditor's records, the address is more likely to be the actual owner than the tax bill mailing address. Working in the Excel spreadsheet, it's a simple matter to remove the duplicates and create mailing labels.

Our newest product, CDXDirect Plus, can be a real time saver, enhance your marketing efforts and make your Web site sparkle. This service feeds your listing data to your Web site. It not only saves you from duplicate data entry but also maintains your Web site seamlessly -- with no additional effort on your part. CDXDirect Plus can be fully customized to match the look and feel of your Web site. Your clients can print reports, see multiple photos and aerials of your listings and e-mail listing reports to others. Finally, you can add password protected files like Pro Forma documents and Rent Rolls -- giving clients the password. This tool can save time -- and give your Web page a professional, polished edge.

Whatever special challenges you are facing, leveraging COCIE tricks, tools and services can help you meet them. Call Cat (614) 202-7025 or Angie at (614) 537-0967 -- we'll help you hash out a solution to your particular situation.